The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy.

Would a flat tax help or harm the United States economy? Does "community policing" lower urban crime rates? Is a balanced budget by 2002 necessary for the country's fiscal health or not? Should the United States enforce the fragile peace in Bosnia? These are some of the central questions facing America in this presidential election year. But according to James S. Fishkin, in The Voice of the People, the press is indisposed to treat these questions seriously; the public is ill-equipped to answer them intelligently; and therefore candidates have little incentive to debate them responsibly.

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The problem, according to Fishkin, is that our political culture has elevated the status and political influence of public opinion without taking adequate account of the degree to which that opinion is uninformed and reflexive. We are treated, he argues, to the common spectacle of government officials and political candidates slavishly deferring to the wishes of a public that might not really know what it wishes. Ask people what they think of Bosnia and they will give you an answer, even if they have never thought of Bosnia before you asked them the question. Ask people about the flat tax, and they will mouth back to you the superficial analysis and assessments offered on last night's evening news. Public opinion, "the giant who rules America," in Fishkin's terms, "may stand over presidents and senators, but it is constructed from the most ineffable of materials--the casual impressions of ordinary citizens."

Fishkin's purpose in writing The Voice of the People is to tout a new form of opinion survey he calls "deliberative polling." Rather than calling a random sample of the citizenry on the telephone and asking them to express opinions they may not have, invite a similarly random sample of the population to a weekend of seminars, lectures, and discussions on the issues of the day. (In fact, Fishkin organized just such a gathering last January in Austin, Texas, and much of it was broadcast on PBS.) Then, after they have spent time reading, talking, and most importantly thinking, ask them to express their opinions on complex issues facing the electorate at large. Through this process, Fishkin claims, pollsters will be able to determine what the general public would think on the issues if it had the opportunity to be as informed and as thoughtful as the random sample. That knowledge would in turn then serve as an incentive for the press to engage in more responsible "civic journalism," and for politicians to eschew simplistic soundbites in favor of reasoned and complex debate.

Deliberative polling strikes me as a pretty good idea whose value should not be oversold. It seems, to be honest, more like a marginally informative gimmick than like the key to elevating political discourse in America that Fishkin claims it to be. Indeed, why not seek the most informed and responsible opinion possible? Why not invite one small sample of the population to carefully consider and discuss among themselves their judgments and conclusions? But in so doing would we really, as Fishkin claims, be uncovering "the considered judgment of the entire country, in microcosm"? Do we have full confidence that the seminars and discussions of deliberative polling are immune from the kind of manipulation and artifice that mar standard opinion surveys? Would the experience of one group, even if randomly selected, with all the presumably unique dynamics associated with its various personalities and rhetorical styles, really replicate itself across a country of 250 million?

The central value of deliberative polling, it seems to me, is not its purported representativeness, but rather its potential to teach us that people have the capacity to reconsider their prejudices and to change their minds when they are given the time and intellectual space to do so. Fishkin offers, in fact, persuasive evidence that this is exactly what his methods produce. What we need to do, armed with this knowledge, is to devise educational, journalistic, and political reforms that will lead the "entire country," and not just a microcosm of it, to be more likely to turn off news programs that offer only horse-race coverage and spectacle, and more likely to hang up on pollsters who ask for only superficial impressions and opinions. If deliberative voting, and this straight-forward and accessible book extolling its virtues, can move us just a bit in that direction, than it will have served a useful and laudable public service.